Here are the slides and reference links for the session Gino Marckx and I are giving at Agile 2010 in August

Triangle Model

Selecting and delivering the most important work is a critical success factor in Agile projects. But how do you know what is important? Unless you are psychic, some help would come in handy. Consider the diagram below to help make sense of the wide variety of strategies and tools.

We explain three different perspectives: Company, Customer, Team.

Team Perspective

The product backlog needs to be structured so that it informs the team of the vision and the work. Whenever the company or the customer priorities are not clear, the team will need to rely on general information and it’s common sense.

Theme Scoring & Screening - Relative or numerical weighting based on criteria (Mike Cohn)

• Video of Mike Cohn at Agile 2008 and Slides
• Agile Estimation and Planning (book)

Story Map – structure the work in a grid that reflects actual product usage (Jeff Patton)

• Jeff Patton’s blog
• Presentation

Software By Numbers – prioritize work by Net Present Value of Minimum Marketable Feature

• Software By Numbers (book)

Customer Perspective

The product backlog prioritization is done from the customer’s perspective, from the perspective of whoever is paying for the product in the first place, whether this customer is internal or external to the company doesn’t really matter. What is most valuable to the customer will be on top. Techniques focussing of this view require strong product domain knowledge, and a good understanding of the impact of specific features on the business.

Kano Analysys - Structured Questionaire to determine feature relevance: Mandatory, Linear, Exciter

• See materials of Mike Cohn from Team Perspective: Theme Scoring & Screening

Innovation Games® - 12 Games to better understand your product and what’s important (Luke Hohmann)

• For Speedboat® and Buy A Feature® + more - innovationgames.com and Book

Company Perspective

Companies need to find a balance in distributing the effort over multiple customers and/or products. But they also need to take the company and product strategies into account, deprioritizing features that might be very valuable for customers but aren’t in line with the company’s vision. As well, this takes into account stakeholders other than customers and sales – support, professional services, etc.

Company and Stakeholder Strategy

• Aligning and Balancing Your Backlog
• Blog: Why Prioritizing Your Product Backlog for ROI Doesn’t Work

Business Value Game – Simulation to illustrate how organizations can define their own business value model.

• Game instructions

Allocation Model - helpful to balance priorities with divergent or competing interests

• See example by Alisson Vale: Slides 40-49

Where to go from here?

The most common questions we have gotten after presenting these techniques are “How do I decide where to start?” and “How do these work together?”

These are complementary techniques and are used to solve related problems. Our recommendation is to start with the area that is the biggest challenge for your project. Maybe this means talking to stakeholders you normally don’t talk to. Maybe it means putting a Story Map up on the wall. It depends.

Slides

For years I have preferred Scrum as a starting place rather than XP since it is easier to adopt. One of the patterns of Fearless Change is to take small steps. Scrum is a much smaller step than XP. That’s old news. Lot’s of folks like to start with XP, that’s OK by me.

Probably a good thing to clarify at the start is that Kanban is part of the Agile family of processes.

Kanban is easier to adopt than Scrum

Way easier. Like almost trivial. Let’s see: no process change, no role change, no change in team structure. Just make the work visible. Wow! There is so much value in just making the work visible. Lot’s of little problems can be fixed and voila – productivity and cycle time gains.

Kanban uses Kaizen = Continuous Improvement

Kaizen is about continuous improvement. Define a standard process and then start improving. Take smalls steps. Get everyone involved. Kanban is a standardized process flow that starts with the existing process.

In the graph of performance vs time on the left, kaizen will result in improvements that will asymptotically approach the limit within that paradigm.

As teams mature, they may go beyond this into the place where Scrum/XP start…

Scrum/XP is Kaikaku = Radical Overhaul

Kaikaku is discontinuous improvement. It is about a revolution in the way things are done. It is also called Breakthrough Kaizen.

Can anyone say Scrum or eXtreme Programming? It changes work groups, job titles, roles, and project basics. For contexts where Scrum is a good fit, it is a high-value, high-cost game-changing move. James Shore has a great post on Kaizen and Kaikaku where he argues that this is a better starting place if you want a high-performance team.

What does this look like in terms of performance? See graph below. It looks like Virginia Satir’s Change Model.

In the Lean world, companies use both kaizen and kaikaku depending on circumstances as they are complementary approaches.

Why a gateway drug?

The gateway drug theory states that softer drugs (Kanban) can lead to harder drugs (Scrum, XP). This is a great metaphor because this theory has been proven as well as dis-proven. To quote David Anderson “we are only beginning to understand the differences between Scrum and Kanban”.

Do I believe in the the theory? I’m not sure that I care – as long as people are working to improve their work environments at a pace that works for them, that is good enough for me. For me, any Agile is good –  it does not need to be one particular style.

Let’s face it – lot’s of organizations are ready for a radical overhaul. For companies like these, Kanban is a great place to start. Getting off the sofa and going for a marathon may not be a good idea. For some it may be better to start by jogging around the block.

Other Perspectives

David Anderson has a contemporaneous post (go read it, it’s good) supporting the notion that Kanban is primarily focussed on continuous evolution until the organization has enough maturity for more radical changes.

Ken Schwaber is continuing the drum beat that Scrum is the one true path.

Alternate Title: A model for understanding Scrum and Kanban

(Cool diagram below – skip down if you are in a rush

As I flew home after LSSC10, I wondered how Kanban-style software development would shape my world in the years to come. I self-identify as an Agile/Lean Coach and wondered what the road ahead looks like for me.

Someone at the conference commented that Kanban was going to dominate discourse in our community. Some people in the Kanban community say it is more widely applicable and is a more rigourous approach. Another commented that software processes historically have a 7 year run and so it is time for the age of Scrum to wane. The arguement goes that even if Kanban isn’t better, the community needs a new buzz to keep things going. All this made me wonder.

Is this true? If it is true, what does this mean for me? How can I reconcile this with what I know works? Before we delve deep, I need to share where I am coming from.

I use Agile

I have used Scrum for many years as a starting point for Agile transitions. It is compact, creates visibility, and builds a team culture. I also use XP practices.

I use Lean/Kanban

I have been using Lean concepts for many years and very heavily in the last year. I have made extensive use of Kanban-style Scrumboards as well as pure Kanban boards for business and support groups. I have had great success with other tools as well: root cause analysis, the A3 technique, and value stream mapping. This winter, I implemented Kanban with a 18 person software group and shifted behaviour with a cumulative flow diagram.

For me, Agile includes Kanban

When I read the Agile Manifesto and principles, I don’t see anything that excludes Kanban. All the XP technical practices still apply – perhaps even more so. Scrum notions of Product Owner, Product Backlog, and Retrospectives still hold value. Iterations may be gone, but they have left a trail of useful concepts of tools that the Kanban community enjoys. Maybe 80% is the same. Why am I making this point? Some proponents on Lean and Kanban highlight the differences rather than relationships: “Kanban is new!” “We are post-Agile” – as if that were cool. Our community is better served by focussing on the positive in every approach.

What I learned at LSSC10 that shifted my thinking.

At LSSC10, I started noticing contexts – what environments and circumstances encourage Kanban-style Agile.

Support Kanban What blew me away was a keynote case study on Kanban turned out to be about a couple of support groups who figured out that Scrum is not a good fit when there are lots of interrupts and emergencies. Ah, um, … not really news. This is the canonical case for Kanban.

Naked Planning or using XP for single-piece flow is about creativity and cross-functional teams swarming work (MMFs). The context here appears to be a team with a lot of focus working on innovations. This is much more similar to Scrum/traditional Agile rather than Kanban.

(Vanilla) Kanban Mike Fitterman and Rick Simmons of Constant Contact told the story of how Scrum wasn’t working out. Two development teams shared QA and product people and found there was too much planning and communication overhead. (Ooops, sounds like ScrumBut.) Anyway, the context in which they applied Kanban was with one with specialists and group that was too large to be a team.

Vale Kanban Alisson Vale described an environment with small work packages that come from a variety of demand channels. (See also video). It very much sounded like system evolution rather than discontinuous innovation. Interestingly, his model does not follow work decomposition by role but rather allows flexible routing and story swarming much like XP.

Production Line Kanban and (Vanilla) Scrum Most insightful of all for me to outline contexts was Clinton Keith’s session on video game development (go read it). He used a timebox for creative work both with takt-time in production-line style Kanban and with Scrum during design and problem solving phases. So, in this situation, they see Scrum for exploration and Kanban for cranking stuff out.

Scrum and Kanban fit different contexts

• Kanban can handle a lot of interrupts
• Kanban supports specialized roles with divergent skill sets
• Kanban excels at repeatable work such as a production line
• Kanban works fine for groups larger than 7+/-2 since communication and planning overhead is lower

• Scrum excels at projects requiring deep collaboration and innovation
• Scrum works best with small cross-functional teams (7+/-2)
• Scrum is great for providing shared goals and work context
• Scrum encourages generalists

For a more comprehensive list of similarities and differences see Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both. See also Jason Yip’s recent observations.

A model for thinking about Scrum and Kanban

I am a visual thinker so I need a picture to put it all together:

• The vertical axis differentiates environments with a strong focus from those with many interrupts and divergent needs.
• The horizontal axis indicates the spectrum from defined, repeatable work to exploratory and innovative work that benefits from swarming.

Every process has a sweet spot

I have indicated where I see various process styles play best. (For example, Scrum is good when there is focus and exploration.) The dashed lines suggest  that these are not hard boundaries. The regions and shapes are more illustrative than literal.

In this model, Kanban is at centre stage. I have repeatedly witnessed first hand that Kanban is very easy to implement and provides great benefits.

I also have seen the value in creating small, focussed teams using Scrum. For sure it is harder and yet very rewarding. On the downside: it doesn’t fit all contexts.

In truth, I am not 100% satisfied with the fidelity of this model, however, it helps me understand how to approach work with my clients

We need to know both Scrum/XP and Kanban

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What tools do you have in your belt?

Henrik Kniberg gives the metaphor of comparing a knife with a fork. Which one is better depends on the situation. We need need to know both Scrum and Kanban. XP, too, but that goes without saying.

As an Agile coach I need to understand a client’s situation to know whether to start with Kanban or Scrum or both. Miyamoto Musashi – a famous Japanese Samurai spoke regarding choice of tools – said “You should not have any special fondness for a particular weapon, or anything else, for that matter. Too much is the same as not enough.”

Let’s build community

For my Scrum and XP friends, Kanban is here to stay and it is going to continue to grow; let’s embrace it and help mature it.

For my Kanban friends, let’s build bridges and create a strong inclusive community.

Hungry for More?

• Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both by Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin
• Kanban by David J Anderson (Just released)
• Scrumban – Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development by Corey Ladas

Thanks

Many thanks to Jason Yip for helping me refine my thoughts and to Siraj Sirajuddin for getting me to attend LSSC10.

What do you think?

The picture I am painting may be missing something. Please share comments or get in touch with me directly to build a better model.

Alternate title: Most Scrum teams need a Kanban board

I am a big fan of Scrum, however, the notion that there are no interruptions during a sprint is simply not realistic in many environments – especially teams adopting Scrum.

Let’s dream of perfection

A key concept from Lean is to dream of perfection. In this case, perfection is “no interruptions”. This is good as a goal but not as a starting point.

Deliver Value

Let’s face it, there is a lot of business value in keeping a production environment up and running. Almost universally, this is more important than getting that new feature out. Unfortunately, this value is usually a form of waste since there may have been things that we could have done to avoid production issues in the first place. It even has a name: failure demand. When we dream of perfection, we dream of zero production issues.

Oops. We live in a world where there are external events. Yep. It’s true. Even Scrum teams. Maybe it’s more useful to drop a story or shallow out some functionality when some important external interrupt happens rather than abort the entire Sprint.

Ken Schwaber told the story of getting kicked out of a client close to home for attempting to veto the company picnic in favour of focus on the Sprint commitment. I keep telling the teams that they are part of a bigger picture and they need to be in tune with that.

I follow the rule of letting Product Owners swap out unstarted stories for new ones if the team agrees. This comes from XP. Darn, broke another Scrum rule in order to maximize business value.

A separate support team is an anti-pattern

I keep getting asked – hey, can’t we have a separate support team?  Then there won’t be any interruptions. NO! Funny thing is that most technical folks don’t want to be on the support team. But the main reason is that it is very useful to have people developing software fix their own bugs and appreciate what it takes to get something working in production. Otherwise defect rates will climb steadily and that’s the wrong direction to go. We want zero defects, not more.

Most Scrum teams need a Kanban board

For as long as I can remember most teams I have worked with have had a support board where we track the actual hours spent on support. Why actual hours? This gives us history and the ability to predict support workload – very handy information during a Sprint Planning Meeting.

More recently I have used a Kanban board for managing support issues.  See sample photo below.

So now, my thinking is that most new Scrum teams probably need a Support Kanban. How about at your company?

Clinton Keith gave an insightful session around designing and configuration a Kanban system for leveled video game production.

Clinton described Scrum and Kanban coexisting peacefully. They used cross-functional Scrum teams to drive collaborative creative work at the outset of the project where team members would swarm stories. Aside from creating the game concept and playability, one of the outputs was to design and implement a Kanban system for producing game levels.

Game level construction requires different highly-specialized skillsets cannot help each other out – the audio engineer doesn’t know anything about graphic design. So Kanban is perfect. A system with fixed takt time was constructed and staffed appropriately to have a steady creation of game levels. Even the levels were broken up into zones to reduce batch size and improve flow.

Some team members continued to run 2 week sprints on solving challenging problems that came up during level construction and playability. For this environment it seems like Scrum and Kanban are both appropriate. This is a huge take-away for me – a better understanding of where Scrum makes sense and where Kanban makes sense.

Another interesting story was to Time Box Art to balance customer value with cost/time when developing artwork (see graph below). Artwork can go on very a very long time and it is difficult to define done. One solution to this is to create a timebox to focus work at the point of diminishing returns. Another benefit is that a timebox can drive creative energy. The example given was that for a high-speed car chase through Paris, you don’t need high-resolution buildings.

If you are interested in learning more, his book Agile Video Game Production is coming out May 2010. Video and slides of the session is on InfoQ.

Part of my standard training for Product Owners is to help them understand how they relate to everyone else in an Agile/Scrum world. Hence the drawing below.

Project Community Diagram

The Product Owner is not part of the team since their role is to ask for more to keep productive tension in the system. I like the way Ron Jeffries narrates about the Product Owner Role without ever using the term. This is a good story. So is the follow-up one.

I like the XP notion of the customer team to reflect the group representing the customers interests. (If anyone can suggest a good link/definition, I’ll add it.)

Why is the ScrumMaster outside? Their primary role is to act outside of the system to help it function and grow. Why is the ScrumMaster cheering on top? Ooops. That’s a bug. If I had time to re-draw, I’d put them underneath holding up the whole system as a servant leader.

So what do you do, if you don’t like the way I have parsed the world? Please help me understand your perspective – draw a picture to show me the world through your eyes.

There was a really good session at the Scrum Gathering’s Open Space on some of the challenges around the CST application process.

What I want to share here is some general thoughts on what is required to be a Certified Scrum Trainer that I noted during the open space session. This is only an excerpt on how to succeed – the full session notes are here.

(Part 4 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

Caveat: There is a Scrum Alliance Improvement Committee working out the new process so this is an informal look at some considerations.

See mindmap below.

It is important to get connected so that people know who you are. If you are considering co-training, find people you like. (N.B. There was some discussion of dropping Co-training requirements so you’ll have to stay tuned on this.)

What you teach when you are CST is your business, however, the evaluation process is based on you wearing your scrum hat. Not your Agile hat. Not your XP hat. Not your PMI hat. Does this mean I need to show a flock of self-organizing geese? Is it OK to share the Agile manifesto? I still don’t know the answer to these questions.

As a CST you will need to develop a curriculum with learning objectives, exercises, etc. There is no official training material that you can use as a baseline – every CST is expected to author training material.

It is important that you contribute to the Scrum Community. This can take the form of organizing a local user group, a conference. Public speaking and publishing articles and blogs is relevant as well.

The big thing I got out of this session is that no one is going to hand you the CST designation because you know Scrum and have run training sessions. Becoming a CST requires excellence and hard work.

You may also want to check out Tobias’s blog posts: So you want to be a CST?, Becoming a CST and Scrum gathering day zero for an informal perspective.

See also my post on becoming a CSC.

I started filling out my CSC (Certified Scrum Coach) application almost a year ago and then I stopped due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I had been using Scrum for quite a while and successfully transitioned a number of teams, but didn’t understand the process and have any context around it to understand how to be successful and even if I should bother.

(Part 4 of 5 blogs on the Scrum Gathering in Orlando)

I signed up for help in the Dialog Room’s Scrum Clinic (thanks Gerry Kirk and Michael de la Maza) the Scrum Gathering.  Roger Brown was kind enough to sit outside by the pool with me and fill in the missing meta-data around the CSC application process. The mind-map below is my effort to capture his perspective on this topic.

The big take aways for me were:

1. Now that I know the process, criteria, expectations and outcomes, I feel comfortable proceeding.
2. A submission needs to be business professional and may take 10-30+ hours to prepare.
3. Three reviewers will score each section to arrive at an overall score (like an exam). No minimum for any section.
4. Agile work is OK, but Scrum is preferred and will score higher.
5. I need to publish an article on the Scrum Alliance website.

Thanks also to Bob Hartman for reviewing and offering his time to help.

Caveat: this is not official Scrum Alliance policy – this is just my understanding of a discussion on this topic. Please see official CSC page here.

At the Scrum Gathering Open Space, there was a great session on this with even more details on the CSC program; please check it out.

I am very happy to announce that Michel Goldenberg (CSM, CST) and I will be running some public training in February in downtown Toronto (Residence Inn Mariott at 255 Wellington St West).

• Certified Scrum Master Training – Feb 16 & 17
• Agile Games Day – Feb 18

This is a great chance to learn from not one but two experienced Agile coaches.  If you know anyone who might be interested, please let them know.

Yesterday, Gerry Kirk and I kicked off a 4 day Agile Assessment with a presentation aimed at taking some of the uncertainty out of Agile and providing context for the transition/assessment.  See slides below.

The values and agile project life cycle slides were not show; instead, Gerry did a live diagram construction (see photo below). This approach worked well and we got lot’s of great questions.

One of the questions was about Agile contracting.  There is a good presentation I commented on in a recent post.